Free Princess From the Past by Caitlin Crews Page A

trying to calm herself. The simple cowl-necked dress was the only item she’d been able to find that was both relatively restrained and unconnected to any of the explosive memories she had not known she’d been carrying around with her.
    But it was not only the memories connected to her forgotten clothes that had unnerved her.
    More than that, she’d realized during that confusinginteraction with Leo that on some level she had forgotten who she was back then. The woman Leo had referred to so disparagingly—the one who had behaved so appallingly, who had, she was humiliated to recall, more than once destroyed more than one piece of china while in a temper—was not her.
    That was not who she was, not anymore. It made her stomach hurt to think of it. To think of who he must see when he looked at her. To think that she remembered her isolation and the loss of all she had loved, but he remembered nothing but a termagant.
    It had been that last night that had changed her, she realised, as she descended the great stone stair that dominated the front hall, rising from both sides to meet in the center and then veer off to the east and west wings. That last, shameful night. It was as if something had broken in her then, as if she’d been faced with the depths of her own temper, her own depraved passions. She’d lost that fiery, inconsolable part of herself, that wild, violent, mad part. For good? she thought.
    Or perhaps it is Leo who stirs up all those dark and disgraceful urges, an insidious voice whispered. Perhaps he is the match. Perhaps without him you are simply tinder in a box, harmless and entirely free of fire.
    “I am shocked,” came his lazy drawl, as if she’d summoned him simply by thinking of him.
    Bethany’s head snapped up and she found Leo standing at the foot of the great stair, his brown eyes fathomless as he watched her approach.
    “I had anticipated you would ignore what I told you and force me to come and deliver you to the table myself,” he continued, and she knew there was a part of him that wished she had done just that. Because there was a part of her that wished it too.
    “As I keep attempting to explain to you,” she said, forcing a smile that seemed to scrape along all the places she was raw, “You do not know me any longer.”
    “I am sure that is true,” he said, but there was an undercurrent in his rich voice that made her wonder what he did not say.
    It was so unfair that he was who he was, she thought in a kind of despair as she continued to walk toward him, step by stone step.
    The walls were covered with heavy tapestries and magnificent portraits of the Di Marco family from across the ages. Every step she took was an opportunity to note the well-documented provenance of the thrust of Leo’s haughty cheekbones, the fullness of his lips, the flashing, dark richness of his gaze, all laid out for her in an inexorable march through the generations. His height, his rangy male beauty, his thick and lustrous hair: all of this was as much his legacy as the castle they both stood in.
    And he was not only the product of this elegant, aristocratic line—he was its masterpiece. Tonight he wore a dark suit she had no doubt he had had made to his specifications in one of Milan’s foremost ateliers, so that the charcoal-hued fabric clung to his every movement. He was a dream made flesh, every inch of him a prince and every part of him devastatingly attractive. It was hardwired into his very DNA.
    How could she explain to this man what it was to feel isolated? He was never alone; he had servants, aides, dependants, villagers, employees. Failing that, he had some eight centuries of well-documented family history to keep him company. He was always surrounded by people in one way or another.
    Bethany had only had her father since she’d beentiny, and then she’d had only Leo. But soon she had lost him too, and it had broken her in ways she knew that he—who had never had no one, who could not